


Under the Lights

by birdzilla



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Kink Meme, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 06:46:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8152810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdzilla/pseuds/birdzilla
Summary: Hunk is captured by the Galra. He knows his friends will come for him, but it's a rough wait. And the aftermath isn't much easier for anyone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in response to [a prompt](https://voltron-kink.dreamwidth.org/1161.html?thread=62857#cmt62857) on the Voltron kink meme. The original prompter requested Hunk-centric whump, with later comfort from the team. This version has been edited from the original, though not significantly.
> 
> There are various general spoilers for the first season in this piece. It also contains depictions of violence, torture, and illness.

The problem with living on a climate-controlled spaceship was that it was impossible to pretend that waking up with the sniffles was due to dust or hay fever. Hunk blew his nose again on yesterday's shirt, then eyed his armor, trying to figure out if there was anywhere he could hide a handful of tissues. Which, of course, required him to have tissues, but he was pretty sure Pidge still had a squashed pocket-pack of them at the bottom of her backpack.

His nose seemed to clear up a bit as he got breakfast ready for the rest of the team, though, and Hunk forgot to ask her about it when they all sat down. He managed one fried goo strip and then his stomach turned over; after a moment's consideration, Hunk slid his portion of scrambled goo onto Lance's plate and refilled his glass of water. Puking in the middle of the mission was the last thing he wanted to risk today.

"Everyone finished?" Shiro asked, when utensils started being put aside, and then stood up at the head of the table. "All right, let's go over the plan one more time."

"We've been prepping for three days, Shiro. We all know what we're doing," Lance said.

"You mean _we've_ been prepping for three days," Pidge muttered, elbowing him. " _You've_ been sitting around making stupid suggestions."

"I still think that my plan to hide it in their sun is a work of unrecognized genius," Lance said, and Hunk and Pidge exchanged a brief look.

"Drop it," Shiro said, and started into his review. "We're going to rescue a holy relic of the Komad species, the Portal of Origin, from the Galra station where they've been holding it hostage to control the Komad. The Komad have advanced enough technology to match the Galra in a fair fight, and they've promised that they'll take our side if we can conceal their relic someplace safe and out of the way of the fighting. We have to get the relic out before we attack the station directly, or we might damage it in the attack. Keith and I are going to go in first and draw as many of the Galra ships around it away as possible. Once we've split their defenses, Pidge, Lance, and Hunk will be going in on the Green Lion. We'll use its stealth capabilities to hide where we've gone with the Portal of Origin once it's secured."

"Making sure the Galra don't track it down is the most important part of the plan," Pidge put in. "I'm going to take it away from the station with the Green Lion in stealth mode, but we'll have to keep the Galra confused until Keith gets it to the asteroid field we're hiding it in."

"Hunk and Coran have adapted an Altaen holographic projector to hide it," Shiro said, with a nod Hunk's way, and Hunk felt a warm glow at having his work acknowledged that even his stuffed head couldn't damp. "Keith, you'll have to blast out part of the asteroid they picked to hide it in, then activate the hologram. It should project an illusion that the asteroid is still intact."

"I'll need the coordinates," Keith said.

"I've uploaded a chart of the asteroid field to the Red Lion's computers," Pidge told him. "The asteroid is marked on it."

"Any other questions?" Shiro asked.

Hunk shook his head, then regretted the motion. He stayed in his seat a moment longer than the others as they all stood, and Shiro stopped on his way to the door.

"Are you feeling all right?" he asked Hunk, his eyes searching. "You didn't eat much."

"I, uh, was worried about my stomach acting up," Hunk said, feeling his face heat. "This is an important mission, it's going to get a whole race of aliens on our side, and we've got to get onto a Galra station, and I'm really nervous, so, uh...." Shiro was frowning. "And my head's stuffed up, so my stomach's upset from all the drainage. But it's nothing serious."

"Let me know right away if you feel any worse and need to pull out of the mission," Shiro said, but he nodded and moved on, trusting Hunk's self-assessment.

Hunk would be fine. He just had a cold, and they'd be through with the mission before it had a chance to get any worse. He followed Shiro out of the room still trying to convince himself that it was nothing.

***

The Galra station was in orbit around the eleventh and last planet of the Komad system, a rocky, airless little rock of a planet that served no other purpose. Galra ships based here patrolled the skies above the second, third, fifth, and six planets and several moons, all of which the Komad had occupied well before the Galra had ever shown up. Hunk had to admit that they'd make for useful allies.

His unsettled stomach felt like a premonition, but with his stuffed head and his general anxiety about the mission, that didn't mean anything. He squashed himself into the back corner of the Green Lion's cockpit so that the other two wouldn't have to hear him breathing through his mouth and wished that he'd remembered to ask Pidge about the pack of tissues.

"Shiro and Keith have started the diversion," Pidge said.

Bright pinpoints of light flashed around the station. Pidge split her screen, bringing up a tactics display in the other half, and Hunk watched with his heart in his throat as the cluster of red dots around the larger square of the station started to split in half, moving towards the two tiny, vulnerable blue dots harassing them from either side. Once most of the Galra had engaged with their lions, Keith and Shiro shot off in opposite directions, drawing all but a couple of the station's guards after them in pursuit.

Pidge triggered the stealth system and began moving the Green Lion out from behind the moon of the tenth planet before toggling the comm. "Allura, the diversion worked. We're going in. I'll let you know as soon as we've got the Portal of Origin so the Komad can come in as support."

"Good luck, paladins," Allura's warm voice answered. "Remember that we're waiting in reserve as well. Don't hesitate to call us in if you need fire support from the castle."

"Got it," Pidge said, turned off the comm, and accelerated towards the station.

Hunk tried to make himself relax as they approached. Shiro and Keith had thinned out the station's defenders beyond all expectation, and they slid easily between the long docking pylons without being noticed. Hunk and Lance drew down the vacuum masks on their armor and exited the Green Lion, using jets to close the distance to the station's surface and then skim along the metal hull until they found a hatch.

Lance stood at the ready to blow it open with his bayard, but Hunk managed to pry it open without Lance's help. He snuffled loudly as the airlock cycled closed, trying to clear his nose without anything to blow it with, and then colored when Lance's "Gross, dude!" made him realize he hadn't turned his comms off beforehand.

The Portal of Origin was made from a metal alloy that, while not unique to the Komad, wasn't often used by the Galra. It had been easy work for Pidge and Hunk to program a hand-held detector, once the Komad gave them a sample, and their greatest obstacle as they made their way to it was dodging patrols. Hunk should have been reassured by how easy this mission was turning out to be, but instead it put him even more on edge.

"This is way too easy," Lance whispered as they reached the last door between them and the relic without any kind of confrontation. "Their security sucks. Either this is where they dump everyone who fails out of basic, or something's up."

Hunk nodded in vigorous agreement and palmed his bayard. "I don't like this. We'd better be ready for trouble."

He triggered the doors. Beyond them, he could see the vast echoing space of a docking bay, and he looked in vain for whatever ship might be docked there--maybe a transport shuttle, to move the Portal of Origin somewhere, or a few dozen of the vicious little Galra fighters they often faced.

Instead, there was nothing inside but the Portal of Origin itself: a huge tangle of long metal rods, curving around and into and between each other, until they created a huge, rough sphere with a hollow space at the center and dozens of gaps leading into it. The shape seemed vaguely familiar, but Hunk couldn't figure out why. It floated in the grip of a Galra tractor beam, without a single guard around it.

Lance and Hunk looked at each other. "This is definitely a trap," Hunk said.

It was Lance's turn to nod. He formed his bayard gun and held it at the ready. "Let's see if we can get in there and back out before it springs."

That was the last thing Hunk wanted to do, but he didn't see any other choice. This was a vitally important mission, their first chance at getting real allies who could hold their own in the fight against the Galra, and they'd come way too far to just back out now. He formed his own bayard cannon, he and Lance exchanged another look, and they both darted out into the empty docking bay.

Shoulders hunched, Hunk ran for the control booth at the side of the bay, and he only flinched a little when he heard the doors they'd come through slam closed behind them. Other, smaller doors at the sides of the bay opened, and Galra soldiers poured out.

"Pidge, we found the Portal of Origin," Hunk said over the comm. "And a whole bunch of trouble. Lock onto our signals and get in here, fast!"

"The door's pretty solid," Pidge said. "It'll take me a minute to shoot my way in."

A few seconds later Hunk heard a hammering of laser bolts against the docking bay's outside door. He leapt up into the control booth, shoved the single Galra soldier manning it out onto the floor below, and followed up the shove with a shot from his bayard to keep the Galra down. Then he turned to the controls, looking for the one that would open the outer doors.

"Hunk, I'll hold them off! Get the door open so Pidge can get us out of here!" Lance yelled.

Hunk had expected some kind of lock on the controls, but it looked like he hadn't given the soldier time to put one on. He slammed the button on the center of the screen, and the doors began to part. Leaving them to open on their own, he started searching for the controls to the tractor beam.

As soon as the doors inched wide enough the Green Lion came roaring in, her paws tucked in close to make it through the narrow space. Landing on all four feet, she came up snarling, and turned her fire on the flood of soldiers that had been about to overwhelm Lance. A few bolts landed on either side of the control booth, as well, taking out some Galra who had been headed for Hunk.

Finding the tractor beam's controls, Hunk opened them up and entered instructions for it to release the Portal of Origin, on a manual delay. He was afraid it would crush Lance beneath it if he just let it drop. "Pidge, go ahead and grab the Portal. I'll turn off the tractor beam as soon as you have it secured."

The Green Lion raised her head, stepped forward, and closed her teeth delicately around a thick bundle of the Portal's curved rods. As soon as he saw it hooked between the cat-machine's fangs, Hunk realized what the Portal of Origin reminded him of: a giant metal ball of yarn.

"Got it," Pidge said.

"I'm releasing the-" Hunk broke off in horror as the screen in front of him suddenly lit up, the Galra sigil for 'LOCKED' emblazoned across every other window. "Guys, I'm locked out of the controls!"

The bay doors, still not quite all the way open, slammed closed with such violence that the whole docking bay rattled around them. Someone had overridden the safety protocols, Hunk thought. Then the entirety of the situation hit him, and he started poking frantically at his own control board. It refused to respond. After a second Hunk dropped down to pull the cover plate off the wiring beneath, instead. They might have locked him out electronically, but if they'd only locked out input from that control board specifically, the relay wires should still work. He just had to figure out which was which.

"Hunk!" Lance yelled.

As far as they could see, he'd just dropped of out sight, Hunk realized. "I'm fine!" he yelled back. "I'm trying to get the doors open using the relays!"

"Hurry," Pidge said, her tone urgent. "There's more Galra coming, and I think they're bringing bigger guns."

Hunk didn't dare look up to see what she meant, but Lance's astonished cursing told him enough. Abandoning finesse, Hunk yanked on a wire just to see what it would do. Then he had to flail wildly for a grip on the console as the gravity went out. "I found the gravity controls!"

"I figured that out!" Lance yelled back.

Hunk glanced through the window long enough to see Lance, drifting upwards towards the Portal of Origins, reach out and snag himself on it. He pulled himself inside, using the metal of the relic as cover from the Galra's guns, and took aim at the Galra also floating up into the vast open airspace of the docking bay. Hunk yanked himself back under the console and tried another wire.

There was a sudden, immense crashing, as of a huge metal lion suddenly thrown off-balance and knocking into a metal wall. "That was the tractor beam," Pidge reported. "Hunk, get out of there! You have soldiers coming your way! We'll shoot our way out, but I'm not leaving without you."

"Just one second," Hunk said, not daring to look up and see how close the Galra were. Shooting a hole through the hull would take the Green Lion a lot longer than Pidge was admitting, and that would give the Galra plenty of time to regroup and do something nasty. "I think I've found the relays for the doors. Lance, hang on."

The Galra who had locked him out had overridden the safety controls that made the doors open slowly. The paladins would benefit from that now. Hunk tightened his one-handed grip on the console before he pressed the wires together.

There was a roaring rush of air, and Hunk's ears popped; belatedly, he triggered his vacuum mask. As the explosive decompression hauled him up over the console and towards the slammed-open doors, he let his grip go and tumbled freely towards space. He could see the Green Lion, jaws clamped around the Portal of Origin, tumbling out through the doors; Lance was a tiny blue dot inside the Portal's wires, clinging tight. Hunk reached for the controls to his armor's jets, but his fingers fumbled on them; the spinning of flight was making his overstuffed head swim. Before he could find the right switch, something hooked around his leg and yanked him back.

"Hunk!" Lance yelled. "Pidge, they grabbed Hunk!"

It could have been the wind in his ears, but Pidge's answer sounded more like a snarl than like words. Hunk saw the Green Lion spin around, jets flaring at her joints, and begin to fly back towards the docking bay.

"No, wait!" he yelled. "You have to get the Portal of Origin out of here!"

The Galra who had grabbed him had jets too, and another soldier joined the first to take Hunk's other leg, hauling him in until they could get ahold of his arms instead. They flipped over, making Hunk's stomach roll dangerously, and hauled him down towards the bay's inner doors.

"-think I can-" Pidge was saying over comms, the roar of the outventing atmosphere sweeping away the rest of her sentence.

The Galra hauled Hunk through the doors and slammed them shut, the noise of the wind abruptly ceasing. There was gravity on this side, and he slumped between them, his spinning head and lurching stomach making it impossible to throw them off.

"As soon as you get it out of here, the Komad will start to help," Hunk choked out into his comm, desperate to keep Pidge from flying back into the bay. "Once they do you can come back for me. You know it's the right-"

One of the Galra soldiers yanked his helmet off, cutting off the transmission, while the other seized his bayard. Then she backhanded Hunk across the face, knocking him to the floor, and rested her booted foot on the chest of his armor. The grin she gave him was sharp-toothed and savage.

"Tell the general we got one of our birds. And I bet I can make him sing."

***

The Galra stripped Hunk out of his armor and undersuit almost entirely with her claws, leaving bleeding gouges where every seam had been. Every time he tried to resist, she knocked him over, knuckles crashing into his face until the inside of his mouth bled from hitting his teeth. Increasingly nauseous, Hunk fell over on his own merits the fifth time he tried to stand up, at which point she and another soldier hauled him upright and dragged him, naked, down the endless corridors of the station. Hunk kind of wanted to puke on her.

Unfortunately, his stomach kept its meager contents to itself until after the soldiers opened the door to a tiny, cramped, dark room--a cell, Hunk realized--and flung him inside. He landed on his knees, doubled over, and spewed his lone fried goo strip and three glasses of water onto the floor while the door closed behind him.

Once he'd gotten himself together as best as he could, Hunk got to his feet and started feeling his way around the cell. It was completely dark, and touch was his only way to explore. There was the door, completely sealed and without a control or even a hinge on this side, and there were three completely blank walls, without even enough space between them for Hunk to spread his arms. Every step splashed through his own watery vomit, which had pooled over most of the available floor. Despite how shaky he felt Hunk chose to lean against the wall of the cell instead of sitting in it.

After an interminable amount of time in the silent dark, Hunk realized that the reason his breath came so short was that the silence was truly _silent_. He was used to the background hum of the castle, which included the quiet hiss of air flowing through ventilation shafts and circulating through whatever room he was in. The cell, however, was absent of even the slightest such sound. In the most unreasonable response to that discovery he could imagine, Hunk caught himself breathing harder and faster, as if he could conserve air by panting; he struggled to control his inhalation and exhalation. In this tiny closet of a cell, he really could run out of air if they left him long enough.

Whether suffocation was better or worse than anything else the Galra could do was up in the air, as far as Hunk was concerned. He knew that the other paladins would rescue him before long, but he also had a pretty good--and a pretty scary--idea of how the Galra treated their prisoners. After a while his legs gave out, and he had to sink down and sit in the pungent circle of dried vomit on the floor, trying to plant as little butt as possible on the fouled surface. The room seemed to get hotter and hotter around him while he waited. Fever, Hunk thought dismally, wiping his nose with his arm, and rested his forehead against his knees.

***

When the door finally opened again, it was the same Galra woman as before, with a different soldier accompanying her to provide a straight-faced counterpoint to her vicious grin. The lights from the corridor seemed to lance straight through Hunk's eyes into the back of his skull, and he squeezed his eyes shut, feeling them water, as he was hauled to his feet. His first step into the corridor felt like he was being blasted with freezing air. It took him a minute to understand, fuzzy-headed as he was, that his cell must have gotten so hot because they turned the heat up. At least that meant he wasn't feverish.

"Wake up, paladin," the female soldier said in a sing-song as they dragged him away from the cell. "The general's got some questions for you."

Another door opened in front of them, and Hunk heard voices raised in argument as they passed through.

"-is the Druid's area," someone was saying. "And he's a paladin of Voltron. If we ruin him for them-"

"I don't care about what the Druids think," someone answered. "I only care about Emperor Zarkon's opinion. We've already failed him once, when _your_ trap was bungled. If we don't get the Komad under control before they start to mobilize, every officer on this station is going to face the consequences."

Hunk blinked the last few stars out of his eyes in time to see a Galra officer, his face distorted with fury, storm out of the room. Another, sharp-eyed and sour-looking, remained within, standing just behind the largest piece of furniture in the room. That was a table, oddly fitted out with straps; even with a stuffed head Hunk could figure _that_ one out. He tried to struggle against his captors' grip, but they forced him down onto it anyway.

"So this is a paladin of Voltron," the sour-looking officer said, looking Hunk up and down. "Not very impressive."

"He's pretty sturdy, general," the Galra woman chirped.

The general gave her a look that was only a degree or two less disdainful than the one he'd given Hunk. "Not too sturdy for you, I hope."

"Of course not, sir," the woman said, and grinned. "The strongest in body usually turn out to be the weakest in mind."

"Hey," Hunk objected weakly from the table, and was secretly relieved when neither of them bothered to acknowledge his protest.

The general didn't respond to her either, just gestured the straight-faced soldier out of the room. Now he and the Galra woman did turn their gazes on Hunk. Looking from the general's pinched expression to the soldier's broad smile, Hunk felt disconcertingly like some small animal cornered by a pair of feral cats.

"You're alone here, paladin," the general said, putting a dismissive twist on the title. "Your friends aren't here to save you. I'm going to presume that, stupid as you look, you aren't actually dull enough to think that we'd let you go. We'll present you to Emperor Zarkon no matter what you say. But what you tell us in the next few hours is going to determine what condition we ship you off in."

The soldier moved to a cabinet along the wall and swung it open. Hunk had to strain to get a glimpse of its contents, but what he saw was disconcerting: shelves of ominous-looking things with sharp, gleaming edges and jagged, stained spikes. He tried to tell himself that the display was supposed to look intimidating, to scare him, but knowing that it was probably intended to alarm didn't make it any less alarming. He strained against the straps holding him to the table, but they held firm.

"The general hopes that you'll be a good little bird and sing for him without any helping," she said, her eyes glinting as she took something from a lower shelf and closed the cabinet door. "And I want what the general wants, of course. But I can't say that I'd _mind_ if you decide to keep your beak shut, because then I get to play with you a little while I pry it open."

"Whatever you want to know, I'm not going to tell you," Hunk said, willing his voice not to shake.

A frown creased the general's sour face. "Don't speak too soon, paladin. As you can see, the lieutenant is quite... eager." There was an ominous whirring noise as she powered up whatever she was holding behind her back. "I have no taste for her pleasures, and I can tell that you don't either. So tell me where your friends have taken the Komad relic, and I will be happy to disappoint her."

Despite his mounting trepidation, Hunk felt a rush of relief to hear the question. That the general was asking it meant that Pidge and Lance had gotten away with the Portal of Origin, and Keith had been able to hide it after all. And _that_ meant his friends had gotten out safe.

"I have no idea," Hunk lied.

He wished that he was telling the truth. Even telling them about the asteroid belt would be bad enough, and he was afraid he knew enough about the asteroid's shape and composition, from tuning the holographic projector, for them to narrow it down on their own, even if only Keith and Coran knew its exact location amid all the others. He'd just have to keep his mouth shut regardless of what they did to him, Hunk resolved, trying to paper his fear over with determination. He couldn't betray the other paladins.

"See, I don't believe you," the lieutenant purred, stepping forward, and the general moved aside to let her approach the table. She held the thing in her hand raised up now; it looked a bit like a flashlight with a knob on one end, except that its flattened bottom was covered with small metal spikes, glowing purple-red with some kind of energy. "We don't have that much data on your species, but I've looked at the files for prisoner 117-9875, and I've picked out a few vulnerable spots to start with."

"No, honest, I don't know where it is," Hunk said, trying to fight down rising panic. He strained against the straps again, but they had no more give than before, keeping him spread out on the metal table. "Only a couple of us know. I, uh, I wasn't in on that planning session, I-"

His protest rose up into a wordless scream as the lieutenant jabbed the glowing end of the device into his shoulder. Its spikes dug into the soft meat between the shoulder joint and his clavicle. If they pierced his skin, he didn't even feel it; his shoulder was too busy lighting up with pure pain, a sourceless agony that screamed on and on up through his nerves, Hunk screaming with it, for far too long. It wasn't until he ran out of air, the scream choked off from lack of oxygen, that the lieutenant pulled the device away.

"Direct nerve stimulation," she said brightly, answering a question that he definitely hadn't asked. "Too precise for me, but the general's a soft touch. Doesn't want me to leave you with any permanent marks if we can avoid it. Are you gonna pay him back for his consideration and sing?"

"I'm serious," Hunk tried, wheezing for breath. "I don't know-"

"Wrong answer," the lieutenant said with evident delight, and drove her toy into his stomach.

This time Hunk started breathless, and he struggled to draw air as the pain went on and on. His diaphragm contracted into a tight knot of agony and refused to release, and Hunk laid there with that one convulsively indrawn breath hanging in his lungs, unable to exhale it in any more volume than a low whine. His chest began to burn, only adding to the raw pain lancing through his abdomen, and the world was starting to shimmer in front of his eyes when the lieutenant let up.

"I'm working my way down, for the record," she told him cheerily.

Hunk swallowed. He could guess what that meant. This time he took a few deep breaths before he answered, trying to salve the burn in his lungs. "I don't know where it is," he said, ashamed at how pathetic his own weak voice sounded, and gave a whole-body flinch of anticipation.

Unable to clamp his legs closed, no matter how much he strained the muscles of his thighs against the straps, he was wide open for the lieutenant to jam the device between them. He did feel the jab of the spikes into his groin, this time, before agony worse than any before washed over him. Hunk was sure he yelled, but he couldn't hear himself over the roaring of his pulse in his ears.

When she finally stopped, holding the faintly glowing knob just above his stomach in potent reminder, Hunk didn't try to voice any denials. He was terrified that if he opened his mouth now, he'd find himself spilling more than lies. Instead he lay limp on the table and panted, snot dripping from his overstuffed nose and pooling in the back of his throat. There were tears in his eyes, and his face was wet.

"Are you _leaking_?" the lieutenant asked, looking him over. "That's disgusting."

"The lieutenant can keep going for quite a while," the general said, speaking at last. He stood there calmly, as sour-faced and unmoved as he'd been before, and bent slightly over Hunk. "Or you can tell me where the relic is."

Looking at that twisted lip, Hunk felt a spurt of rage rise in him. He scraped the back of his throat, gargling a mouthful of mucus, and spat.

The general stepped back, his face pinching even more tightly, and wiped his cheek clean. "Carry on, lieutenant," he said, stepping back into a corner. "You have the floor."

The lieutenant had picked out more than a _few_ vulnerable spots, Hunk discovered, and she hadn't been joking about working her way downwards. Her access to the back of his knees was poor, but she finessed the angle, and she seemed to take a disturbing amount of pleasure in the way Hunk screamed when she got to the soles of his feet. He sobbed outright when she returned to his groin and started her way back upward. At one point he realized, in a flash of unwelcome clarity, what human prisoner she must have gotten her data from, and his dry retching was due as much to that realization as the pain shooting up and down his arm from the inside of his elbow.

Eventually he gave out, though not in the way his captors had hoped. The room had started to swim in front of his eyes, a blurry haze of purple light and regular pain, and the very regularity of it became numbing. Hunk hurt, but it was a very predictable sort of hurt, an _inevitable_ hurt, and there wasn't anything that he could do about it but endure. He stopped hearing the question they posed, over and over again, in the interstices between the pain, and eventually the world went fuzzy all around him and then just stopped entirely.

***

When Hunk woke again, he was back in the rancid little cell, sprawled across the floor. It was no longer lightless, though; instead a single panel in the ceiling blazed with clear white light, harsh and over-bright, and he blinked against it and turned his gaze downward. His whole body ached, muscles sore from clenching against the pain from earlier, but of those assaults themselves there was no sign--no particular twinge where the Galra lieutenant had planted her device, no blood, not even bruises to mark the agony it had brought.

Though Hunk had more than enough to worry about without bruising. His temples throbbed, and his head felt even more stuffed than before, though he'd have thought his pained sobbing would have cleared his sinuses out. When he sat up, slowly and carefully in consideration of his sore muscles, he felt too dizzy to continue into a standing position, and his joints twinged in warning. That always meant that a cold had settled in for the long term, in Hunk's experience. He reached up gingerly to probe his swollen, tear-puffed face, and felt his cheeks and mouth crusted over with mucus.

Even looking down, the light stabbed at his eyes, but Hunk tried to take an accounting of the cell anyway. Sight revealed little more than touch had; the walls and floor were the purplish-grey metal he'd expected from the other Galra interiors he'd seen, the door showed only the thinnest of seams where it met the wall, and there wasn't even a light fixture overhead, just the glowing panel, which brief experimentation proved to be something tougher than glass.

He still couldn't hear any sounds of ventilation, but he didn't have the energy to panic about that this time. The general had already made it clear that he wanted to keep Hunk alive, hadn't he? They wouldn't suffocate him in here. Not on purpose, anyway--Hunk wasn't sure they knew how much air a human needed, or whether it differed from the needs of a normal Galra. The room was once again stuffy and over-warm, but with his plugged-up nose, that was almost a benefit to him.

Leaning against the wall, Hunk tried to drowse, fading in and out as physical discomfort and mental exhaustion warred within him. At some point his need for sleep must have won, because the harsh light filling the cell faded out, and when he opened his eyes again it was once again pitch-black in there. It was hotter now, and the heat continued to rise, until he wondered if the Galra were planning to roast him alive in this cramped metal box.

He felt even more dizzy than before, his ears so badly plugged they were aching, and he struggled to breathe around the slime in his throat. Coughing up phlegm to clear his airway, Hunk realized he had nowhere to spit it and swallowed it down, grimacing in disgust. Then, stomach turning unhappily, he blew his nose in the crook of his elbow for lack of anywhere else to do it. The Galra hadn't left him with a single scrap of clothing to wipe himself off with, so all he could do was sit there with his skin crawling and scratch drying flakes of mucus off his face.

It couldn't have been that long, or the other paladins would have come for him already. The conviction would have been stronger if Hunk had any way of keeping track of the passage of time. He couldn't focus on counting off seconds for more than a minute at a time, and he kept falling back into a restless, fitful sleep that further befuddled him. The too-bright light flicked on and off in no pattern he could tell, further confusing him; the only consistency was that it seemed to blaze right through his eyelids whenever he started to fall into a true, refreshing sleep. He couldn't even tell if his aching head and the heaviness in his limbs was exhaustion or simply the rising tide of illness.

What if the Komad hadn't held to their bargain after all? The trap around the Portal of Origin might not have gotten all of them, but the Galra had clearly had enough foreknowledge of their movements to set it up. It seemed obvious to Hunk that someone among the Komad high command must have betrayed them. The Galra general had talked about getting the Komad under control _before_ they mobilized, which meant that by that time they hadn't started moving yet, if they weren't all traitors and they still intended to take Voltron's side. And if the Komad weren't backing Voltron after all, then getting back here to rescue him became a much more difficult proposition.

And a dangerous one. Hunk thought of his friends getting hurt by the Galra in the attempt, and his stomach gave an unhappy lurch. The last thing he wanted was to become bait for a second, more successful trap.

That unhappy thought kept him awake for a long, uncomfortable stretch, before he finally stumbled back down the steep slope into sleep.

***

Hunk was still only half-awake when a pair of expressionless soldiers hauled him out of the cell a second time and off to the same room as before. This time the corridors were just as hot as the cell had been, and he wondered nonsensically if they were all going to roast together in this boiling atmosphere. Then they flung him on the table again, and the metal felt like ice against his flushed skin.

Okay, this time it really had been a fever.

"The general's not very happy, my little bird," the Galra lieutenant said. She was going for the same cheerful sing-song tone she'd used before, but she was stalking stiff-legged around the table as she spoke, unable to hide her anger. Hunk was briefly reminded of an irritable cat; if she'd had a tail, it would have been lashing. "We need that silly little Komad relic you took, and we need it now. In the interest of finding it, the general has hardened his soft heart and decided that maybe I can mark you up after all. Unless you're ready to sing for me?"

No clever answers were germinating in his fever-fogged brain. Hunk swallowed and shook his head.

"I'm in more of a hurry than I'd like," the lieutenant said, "but I'd be lying if I told you if I wasn't going to enjoy this anyway, just a little."

She opened the cabinet, and Hunk turned away, squeezing his eyes shut. He felt a rush of shame that almost eclipsed the fear in his belly, but he didn't want to look and see what she was going to choose out of that selection of ugly instruments. He had no idea what she meant by 'marking him up,' and he _really_ didn't want to find out.

"Don't worry," the lieutenant said. He could hear her boots against the metal floor as she walked over towards him, and his heart hammered in his chest. "You'll go to the Druids eventually, so I'll make sure that anything I damage, they can replace."

That wasn't reassuring. The thought hung in Hunk's mind for several tense, breathless seconds, as he waited in choking dread, and then pain--a new kind of pain, something deeper and more visceral than the nerve stimulator had caused--exploded up and down his left arm. He could hear the crack of bone, feel the jagged snapping of his forearm, and a scream tore its way out of his swollen throat. When he opened his eyes, the lieutenant stood over him, holding nothing more elegant than a heavy metal bar.

"I told you, I'm in too much of a hurry to really enjoy myself," she told him. She wasn't grinning, for once, but there was a wild, dangerous light in her eyes. "The general's already shredded my ears, and I don't intend to let him do it again. So do you have any answers, little bird?"

Hunk tried to hold back the sobs rising from his chest, but they were impossible to swallow, choking him until he gave them voice. He could feel fresh tears streaming from his eyes.

After a long moment to see if he'd follow that up with words, the lieutenant shrugged and lifted the bar again. Hunk tried desperately to twist away, the straps on the table digging into his skin, but pain tore up and down his broken arm when he tugged against the strap holding his wrist, and he fell prone just as the bar came down.

This time she hit his elbow, right at the joint, and the jolt of agony that ran through him at that blow was enough to make his gorge rise. Or maybe that was at the sound: a crunching noise, deeper and uglier than the earlier crack, as the cartilage at the joint was crushed and twisted under the impact. The sensation throbbed up and down his arm and all the way through his chest to make his stomach twist, each pulse of agony echoing the moment of impact.

"Wait," Hunk sobbed. "Stop. Please, stop."

The Galra lieutenant had started to raise the bar again, but she stopped in mid-motion. A flicker of disappointment crossed her face. "Are you going to answer the question?"

"No, just. Stop, please, I don't want...."

"I only stop when you sing, birdy!" A flash of her previous, manic cheer appeared on the lieutenant's face.

Hunk hadn't realized that he'd curled the fingers of his left hand inward until she used her free hand to straighten them, sending fresh spikes of pain through his maimed arm. Unable to stop the whimpers rising in his torn throat, Hunk tried to tuck them under his palm again, but the torn and battered muscles of his arm were too mangled to properly convey the command. The lieutenant just tsked at him, pulled them straight again, and then brought the bar down.

At least Hunk couldn't hear the cracks of the tiny bones shattering under his own, anticipatory scream. On an objective scale, some dim, hazy, fever-fogged analytical corner of his mind noted, it didn't actually hurt _more_ than the blow to his elbow, it just hurt differently. Pain bloomed all across his hand, tiny bone fragments digging into the flesh they'd been driven into, and Hunk turned his head sideways, feeling stomach acid and drainage burn all the way up his throat to pool on the table beside his head.

"Ugh," the lieutenant said, and stepped down the length of the table, away from the formless puddle of vomit. "That is so disgusting. Don't suppose you have any words to add to it? No? You have three more limbs you don't really need, you know," she added, laying a hand on Hunk's thigh, and he jerked and shuddered under her touch. "And I can always come back up and work that arm over a little more."

"No," Hunk whispered.

For a moment, the temptation to just give her the answer she wanted was overwhelming. He didn't want the other paladins to see him like this, when they came. He still had to hold on to his faith that they were coming. Telling the Galra where the Portal of Origin was hidden wouldn't do that much harm, would it? All he could tell them was the asteroid belt, and they'd spend long enough searching that surely the other paladins or the Komad would catch them at it, and be able to move it again....

No. Hunk wasn't going to tell the Galra anything, even as little as what color the lions were. There was too much risk that they _could_ use the information, and turn the Komad back against his friends. That they were so worried about learning it suggested that the aliens had held up their end of the bargain in the end, so all Hunk had to do was survive until the other paladins got here. He pictured their faces in his mind, the friends it was his duty to support, and it firmed his resolve.

"No," Hunk said again, rasping it with as much force as he could and glaring at her as firmly as possible given his bruised and puffy face.

She glared back at him, the wild look still in her eyes, and Hunk tensed against the next blow. Then, just as shocking, came the blast of a klaxon from overhead. The Galra lieutenant jumped nearly as violently as Hunk did at the sound.

The word she snarled was alien to him, but the fury with which she flung aside the metal bar, letting it slam into the wall and clatter to the floor, made its general meaning clear. Overhead, a hidden loudspeaker was ordering all crew to battle stations. "You stay right where you are," the lieutenant said, pointing at Hunk as if she'd forgotten that he was strapped to a table, and stalked angrily out the door.

It hissed closed behind her, and some of the tension cramping Hunk's chest eased, though the agony throbbing up and down his left arm kept his shoulders tight and his gut clenched. He tried to relax further, breathing shallowly in and out through his mouth, swallowing a few times in a vain attempt to soothe his raw throat. He had no idea how long it would be before she returned to continue her work, but the blaring klaxon made him hope that she might not come back at all.

His hopes sank when he heard boots clanging against metal just outside the door only minutes later. The door hissed open, and Hunk tensed, trying to steel himself for-

"Hunk!"

Shiro was beside the table in less than a second. His metal hand, shaped into a blade, sliced through the straps holding Hunk down with delicate precision. Hunk barely even felt the metal brush his skin as Shiro cut him free. Shiro blistered the air when he saw Hunk's arm, and Hunk gritted his teeth and forced himself to hold still as Shiro very carefully worked the straps on that arm away from rapidly swelling, purpled flesh.

"Hey," Hunk said, giving him a weak smile. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize," Shiro said, and for a startling moment he looked at Hunk like he was about to cry, guilt and anguish open on his face. Then his expression shuttered, flattening with rage and going smooth and hard, and he moved around the table and ducked down to drag Hunk's undamaged right arm over his shoulders. "I'm sorry it took so long to get you out. Hang on. I'm trying to be careful, but there's no way this isn't going to hurt."

Hunk bit his tongue and swallowed against a cry of pain as Shiro lifted him from the table, the movement alone enough to make a fresh jolt of pain run up his mangled arm. "The Komad must have sold us out," he said, in an attempt to distract himself. "But the Galra sounded worried about them?"

"They should be. The Komad set us up, but they're on our side for now," Shiro said, his voice grim. "We haven't told them where we stashed the Portal of Origin either. I decided if they wanted it back, they'd have to help us get you out first."

The clear statement of Shiro's priorities might have made Hunk feel pretty good about himself, if he hadn't been draped over Shiro right with his arm feeling like a black hole of pain at his side. His sore legs cramped when he tried to make them bear his weight, and he was forced to curl them up and let Shiro carry him.

"I've got Hunk," Shiro said into the comms as they headed out of the room. "But he's in pretty bad shape. I'm going to need back-up to get back to my lion."

"I've got his armor and bayard," Keith's voice came from Shiro's helmet. "I'll meet you where we split up and escort you back."

Up until that moment, Hunk hadn't really thought about the fact that he was naked. Everything else, his arm and his cramping muscles and his pounding head, had taken priority. But now a rush of embarrassment washed through him, and his face, already flushed with fever, got even hotter. "Shiro," he hissed urgently into his leader's ear. "Shiro, I'm not wearing anything."

"That's not important right now," Shiro said.

In the stress of the situation, Hunk's state of undress was somehow ballooning into the most important thing possible. He knew it was shock talking, but he couldn't stop himself from pleading, "I don't even have underwear."

Shiro stopped in the corridor and gently set Hunk down, lowering him until he was sitting safely on the floor. Hunk braced himself with his right hand, letting his left hang limp at his side in the hope that would be less painful (it wasn't), while Shiro walked a few feet down the corridor and reached down to grab a limp, prone Galra soldier. When he flipped it over, Hunk saw that it was the Galra lieutenant. Her head flopped loose in an unnatural fashion; she'd been almost decapitated by some kind of blade, though there was no blood, just a smooth, deep cut that looked like it was cauterized at the edges. Hunk thought of the purple glow that appeared around Shiro's hand when he formed it into a blade.

"She told me where to find you," Shiro said as he stripped her uniform jacket off. He didn't look at Hunk as he said it, his head down to hide his expression. It spared Hunk from having to worry about what might be visible on his own face. "I didn't like the answer."

He wrapped the jacket around Hunk's waist like a sarong and secured it by tying the arms together over his hip, then hauled Hunk over his shoulder again and began carrying him down the corridor. After a few twists and turns, pausing at junctions with other corridors to check whether they were clear, they reached the broad intersection where Keith was waiting, the fallen, sparking bodies of sentries scattered around him. He had a bundle on his back and held his sword at the ready, but his steady stance faltered when they saw him, and his eyes went wide.

"Hunk," he said, starting to reach out and then realizing that he he still had his sword in hand. His face twisted with anger. "Those Galra bastards are going to pay for this."

"She kind of already did," Hunk blurted.

Shiro looked startled, then nodded, a muscle tightening in his jaw.

Hunk was feeling woozy, his head swimming again, but he tried to smile at Keith. It made his bruised cheek hurt. "I knew you guys were going to come."

Keith just looked at Hunk, his angry expression softening. "Yeah," he said simply. "We wouldn't have left you."

"We need to get Hunk out of here," Shiro said, and nodded down one of the passageways. "The Black Lion's not far. Help me get him there."

Keith sheathed his bayard and moved as if to take Hunk's dangling arm, then stopped himself, wincing and scowling as his fingers hovered over the dark, swollen flesh around Hunk's elbow. "I'll take point," he said, stepping away and releasing his bayard again, shield shimmering to life around his other arm. "Keep an eye on our rear. I took out this patrol, but if another one finds them, they might come up behind us."

"Guys," Hunk said. He was feeling light-headed, and Keith seemed to fuzz in and out of focus in front of him. "I think I'm gonna...."

"You're okay, Hunk," Shiro said, firm and assured. "We've got you."

Hunk took that as the permission it was to close his eyes and let them carry him onward, even the jolting of his arm unable to cut through the fog creeping through his mind.

***

The next few hours were nothing but a confusing blur. He vaguely remembered being bundled into the Black Lion's cockpit, and he had a very clear memory of taking off, his arm banging against a console hard enough to make him shout as Shiro was forced to dodge fire from a Galra ship. He had a distinct flash of Allura's face hovering over him, drawn with worry, and Coran leaning in beside her and saying something nonsensical in a soothing tone. Whether it was nonsensical because he was feverish, because it was meant to be, or because it was Coran, Hunk wasn't sure.

Pidge was shouting, somewhere in there, and Hunk felt like it might have been at him, but then Keith snarled back at her, so maybe they'd been fighting instead. After a certain point Lance was an omnipresent hovering figure in every moment he could recall, hanging over him and occasionally clinging to his unbroken hand. Shiro reappeared after a while, saying something very serious and sincere that Hunk had absolutely no memory of, besides the tone and the guilt on Shiro's face. Then there was a soothing blue-green light, and a refreshing coolness that left his whole body relaxed and blessedly numb, and he faded away into the blue-green glow and everything was silent and still for a very long while.

***

Hunk's first thought, when he stumbled out of the healing pod, was that it made no sense at all that his head was still stuffed.

Shiro and Coran were there to catch him as soon as he tripped, lowering him down between them to sit on the steps in front of the pod. Hunk took a quick physical inventory; nothing hurt except for the dull ache in his sinuses, not even a lingering soreness in his arm. When he looked down it seemed whole, normal in size and color, and he flexed his muscles and fingers experimentally and felt them respond without even the slightest pain.

"How do you feel?" Coran asked, crouching beside him.

Allura and the other paladins clustered around, looking at Hunk with anxious anticipation. Shiro had a hand on Lance's shoulder, holding him back, and he smiled when he caught Hunk's eye.

"I'm still stuffed up," Hunk said, and his voice was nasal enough to back up the complaint. "But everything else feels okay."

"I don't have enough data on you earthlings yet to calibrate the healing pod to deal with everything at once," Coran said. "Illness is much trickier for it to handle than simple injury, so I programmed it to ignore the respiratory infection and concentrate on healing the flesh wounds. I'm still not sure it would be able to clean the infection out of those pesky mucus membranes you have, but if you'd like to give me a few hours to reprogram it, we can make the experiment! There's less than a two percent chance it could cause any damage that would permanently affect your breathing."

"Let's not," Shiro said, and Hunk nodded in hasty agreement.

"All I need for that is rest and lots of soup," he said. His face fell as he remembered the culinary resources they had on hand; the goo was pretty liquid, but not quite liquid enough to count. "Or goo, I guess. I've been having colds all my life. They're not dangerous, just gross."

"Rest we can provide," Allura said. "We've cleaned up your room for you, and it has everything the other paladins think you might need during your bedrest. You're not to do anything until you're fully recovered."

"Thanks, guys," Hunk said, feeling unexpectedly touched, even if he was just a little worried about how his friends might have rearranged his room in his absence.

He rose slowly to his feet, with Coran's hand under his arm to steady him. As soon as he was upright, Lance tugged himself free of Shiro's restraining hand and rushed in to fling his arms around Hunk, burying his face in Hunk's shoulder. "You scared me, big guy."

Returning the hug, Hunk squeezed him back as tightly as he could, until Lance made a squashed noise and pulled his face away. "I'm glad you're okay," Hunk said. "I was kind of worried when I got the doors open that you were going to get blown out of the Portal."

" _You_ were kind of worried?" Pidge asked, making an indignant noise. "How do you think _we_ felt? You got yourself captured by the Galra right in front of us!" She glowered at him, but Hunk could see the distress behind her anger.

"Sorry," he said to her, ducking his head to hide a smile that would only have upset her more.

"Pidge, Hunk doesn't need you yelling at him," Shiro cut in. "He needs to get some food and some rest. We have leftovers in the mess hall for you," he told Hunk, throwing an arm over his shoulders, "and then you're headed straight to bed."

Hunk didn't argue as Shiro led him away. Lance fell in beside him, his hand brushing repeatedly against Hunk's arm as if he was reassuring himself that Hunk was real, and the rest trailed behind. Hunk felt a hand touch his back, and he glanced over his shoulder to see a glimpse of Keith pulling away, looking at him with an unreadable expression in his dark eyes. Pidge elbowed her way past Lance to walk in front of them, glancing back often enough that she almost walked into a wall where a corner turned. At the center of their informal parade, Hunk felt a warm feeling growing in his chest at everyone's concern.

***

Even warm fuzzy feelings couldn't make Coran's special culinary creations taste good, and Hunk, his appetite dampened by both the pod and his stuffed head, dug in with resignation rather than enthusiasm when presented with a damp, gooey mass that seemed to squirm every time he stuck a spork in it. Once he was ensconced in his room, he awaited his next meal with trepidation.

But instead of Coran showing up with another plate full of horror, it was Keith who came through the door, a platter in his hands. Hunk pushed himself up into a sitting position and propped himself up on his pillow. Then he had to scrabble for the pile of trapezoidal Altaen handkerchiefs that Coran had provided and noisily blow his nose.

He was a little embarrassed at how much sound and snot he produced in the process, but when he bundled it up and set it carefully aside, Keith was just looking at him with a sympathetic look. "Colds suck, huh?"

"Yeah," Hunk agreed. "Is it time for dinner already?"

"Not quite." Keith carried the platter over and set it on the metal box that Coran had hauled out of storage as a temporary bedside table. "You sounded earlier like you really wanted some soup, and we don't have any cans of it here, but you know how if you simmer the goo long enough it kind of... congeals? So there's big chunks of harder stuff in liquid? I strained the chunks out, and I chopped up the last of that tuber you found on the last planet and put it in."

"You made me soup," Hunk said, deeply touched. He blinked a few times and picked up the bowl, breathing in deep to take in the steam rising from its surface.

Keith, hands in his jacket pockets, shrugged. "It's like you told Coran. If you have a cold, you need rest and soup."

"Definitely. It's the only cure," Hunk said, picked up a spork, and shoveled soup into his mouth before he could start choking up.

He nearly choked anyway when the thin goo-broth hit his tongue. Separated from its solid elements and combined with the starchy, earthy flavor of the tuber, the overall effect was somehow both completely flavorless and foully bitter at the same time. His eyes started to water, and he swallowed with effort.

When he looked up, Keith was watching him for his reaction, so he took another mouthful and gave Keith a thumbs-up. He was rewarded with one of Keith's rare smiles. For a moment Hunk preoccupied himself with chewing and swallowing, taking a long time over it to keep from having to take another bite.

"Aside from the cold, are you feeling alright?" Keith asked.

He was looking Hunk over critically, but his gaze kept returning to Hunk's arm. Hunk remembered the moment on the Galra station when Keith had gone to touch it and stopped at the sight of the mangled flesh, and he waggled his elbow a little so that Keith could see it in operation.

"Just like new," he assured Keith. "Which is good, because we only need one guy with a metal arm on the team. I wouldn't want Shiro to think I was copying him."

"Good," Keith said, vehemently. "I'm sorry it took us so long to come get you. I wanted to just ditch that stupid Portal and come back for you right away, but Shiro said we'd have a better chance if we could get the Komad to start fighting back and divide up the Galra fighters."

"I'm glad you got it hidden," Hunk told him. "I got caught trying to help Pidge get away with it in the first place. It would _really_ suck if I'd gotten captured and beat up for nothing."

"I guess." Hunk could see Keith's hands fisting inside his pockets. "But we're a team. We're supposed to put each other first. I kept thinking about you with the Galra, and.... Next time I'm not waiting," Keith said, his dark eyes flashing with determination.

Privately, Hunk would be okay with that, but he wasn't going to say that out loud and encourage Keith to disobey Shiro's orders. Shiro had made what had seemed like the right call at the time, and it wasn't his fault that the Galra had taken it as a reason to interrogate Hunk. Though he had to make sure Keith didn't find out that they'd started in on him _because_ the other paladins had hidden the Portal of Origins, Hunk realized.

"I wasn't scared, because I knew you guys would come for me," Hunk said. He paused, and honesty forced him to admit, "Okay, I was pretty scared. But I did know you guys would come as soon as you could, so I wasn't _as_ scared."

Keith nodded, apparently out of words, and Hunk gathered up the focus to work a little more on his soup. Eventually his fortitude gave out, though, and he had to set the bowl aside half-eaten.

"I really appreciate that you made this for me," he told Keith, picking a line he could say with sincerity instead of trying to lie about the quality of the soup. "But I don't have a big appetite right now."

"Are you sure you're really Hunk?" Keith asked, so deadpan that Hunk couldn't tell whether he was actually suspicious and not just joking.

He reached out to press the back of his hand against Hunk's forehead. Hunk froze, and so did Keith, looking as startled as Hunk was by the gesture. After a moment he pulled his hand away and picked the platter up, backing towards the door.

"I'll put this in stasis and warm it back up for dinner," he said. "Get some rest, Hunk."

As soon as he was gone, Hunk flopped back onto his pillows and wondered if he could plausibly sleep through dinner.

***

Apparently, Hunk had managed to not only sleep through dinner, but all the way through the night. Coran poked his head in to deliver breakfast while Hunk was still waking up and too woozy to be coherent or fend off the meal, and when Hunk was finally ready to greet the world, he found Shiro perched on his bedside box, poking at the floating platter that contained the mushy remnants.

"Hunk, you're awake," Shiro said, noticing immediately when Hunk shifted on the bed.

"I was awake," Hunk said, and then, aware that he probably hadn't looked it, added, "Mostly."

"Right." Shiro indulged him with a nod.

"Did you need something?" Hunk asked, squinting at Shiro as he tried to remember the word niggling just at the edge of his mind. Oh, there it was. "A debriefing?"

"No," Shiro said. "That can wait until you're over the cold. I just wanted to check on how you're doing."

Good, Hunk thought. Waiting on the debriefing would give him more time to figure out how to wiggle around the whole 'the Galra started torturing me because you guys hid the Portal of Origin' thing. It wasn't just Keith who'd feel guilty about that, he'd realized, and he didn't want to be even more of a downer to the team.

"Fine," Hunk said. "I mean, I'm running out of handkerchiefs, if you want to ask Coran if he can find me more, but my arm's fine, and I'm not even sore."

"I wasn't talking about your arm," Shiro said, apparently unaware that he'd flexed his metal fingers when Hunk mentioned it. He looked at Hunk with an almost painfully serious expression, worry lurking behind the team-leader steadiness. "I wanted to ask how you're feeling. You had some pretty serious stuff happen to you, Hunk. It's all right to be affected by it. I know we didn't go through the exact same thing, but remember that I was held by the Galra too, and if you want to talk, I'll understand."

A forgotten realization tinked home in Hunk's mind, and he pushed himself up, leaning against the wall of his bunk. "Shiro," he said, hesitating over the question.

Shiro just looked at him, open and supportive. "What is it?"

"When that crazy woman started in on me the first time-" Shiro's face twitched like he wanted to ask a question, but he kept his silence "-she said something about... knowing the vulnerable spots on a human because she'd studied data from a human prisoner." Shiro's face twitched again, going flat, and Hunk scrabbled to remember the rest. "She had a number. It was, uh, something, then nine eight seven five- I don't remember the first bit."

"117-9875. That was mine." Shiro relaxed, his shoulders slumping with what looked like relief. "Like I said, I know what you've been through."

Hunk nodded. Right now the idea of talking about what had happened seemed exhausting. He and Shiro sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, but at last Shiro shifted in his seat.

"Crazy woman?"

"The Galra lieutenant who- did all that stuff," Hunk said. "She was the one you killed in that hallway. You did kill her, right?"

Shiro looked away, and his metal fingers flexed again. "Yeah."

"I don't feel bad about it," Hunk offered. He paused to consider that. "Actually, I do feel bad, a little. But I feel bad about not feeling bad. Like, I feel like being so glad she's dead isn't a good thing, because if I was a really good person, I'd pity her, or something. But I don't. She was really awful, and I was really scared of her, and I feel better knowing you did kill her, because now I don't have to be scared of her any more."

"Hunk, she tortured you. You don't have to feel bad about your feelings at all." Shiro looked back at him, blue eyes intense, and leaned forward to rest his left hand on Hunk's shoulder. "You're a good person, and you care a lot about people. But there's nothing wrong with being glad she was dead. Save your compassion for the people who deserve it. She's not one of them."

He squeezed Hunk's shoulder a moment more, then let go and patted it. Hunk felt tears welling in his eyes and tried to blink them back, but a few slipped out anyway. He couldn't help feeling a little guilty, still, but the conviction behind Shiro's words was convincing in its own right.

"Thanks," he mumbled, looking down at his hands.

Shiro patted his shoulder a couple more times, then pulled away. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Even that brief discussion had been just as exhausting as Hunk had anticipated, and he couldn't bear the thought of more. "Not now," he said. He considered Shiro's concern, the open sympathy in his offer. "But I'll let you know when I do."

"Don't force yourself." Shiro stood up. "It'll come with time. For now, just get some rest."

***

Despite Shiro's orders, Hunk lay awake for what was probably a few hours, occasionally shifting fitfully in his bed or straightening up enough to properly blow his nose. He was at that point in his cold where his head was still stuffed enough to make him miserable, but he wasn't sick enough anymore to just sleep through the misery. Instead he tried to get comfortable and wondered if there was any chance they could find a drugstore in space.

His next visit was presaged by a skittering in the closest air vent. Lowering his arm from where he'd flung it over his eyes, Hunk squinted at the tiny shapes poking their noses through. "Hi, guys."

One of the mice squeaked and dashed back into the ventilation shaft, and a moment later his door hissed open and Allura poked her head through. "Hunk, do you mind if I come in?"

"You're welcome to," Hunk invited, wriggling up into a sitting position again. "The mice can come too. It's getting boring in here."

"Everyone keeps telling each other to let you sleep," Allura said, crossing the room to sit on the edge of his bed, legs crossed and hands neatly folded in her lap. "I must admit, I'm surprised that your people treat such a disabling illness so lightly. On Altaea, no one would be so calm about an infection that can impair your breathing and confine you to bed."

"You don't really have to stay in bed if you have a cold," Hunk told her, feeling himself color. "But they're really gross, and you get over them a lot faster if you rest and take care of yourself. If you keep trying to work like normal, it'll last a lot longer. There's not really a cure for it, so if you get one, you just want to get it over with."

"I see," Allura said, frowning sympathetically. She laid a hand on Hunk's arm. "I'm sorry we couldn't program the healing pod for it."

Hunk shrugged and gave her a smile. "It's not that bad. I get to lie around and have food brought right to me. Keith even made me soup."

"Is that what it was?" Allura winced. "I'm sorry, I thought it was something that had gone bad, so I threw it out."

Hunk breathed a sigh of relief. "That's fine. It was really bad," he said. "Don't tell Keith I said that."

Allura laughed. "Your secret is safe with me."

Hunk grinned back, chuckling a little.

Taking her hand off his arm, Allura smiled at him again and rose from the bed. "I'm afraid I don't know enough about soup to make you more of it, and I can't stay much longer. We're still sorting out things with the Komad--they seem to think they've done nothing wrong, and _now_ they're agitating to join the Voltron Alliance. But I can tell the other paladins you're awake, if you like, and let them know that you're bored. You don't need to be alone in here."

"That would be good," Hunk said, watching her head for the door. "Thank you."

"It's nothing." Reaching the door, Allura turned back to him as it opened, her eyes glittering. "I'm glad you're alright. You're not just the leg of Voltron, Hunk. You're the strong spirit supporting all of us, and we couldn't carry on without you. Remember that the next time you put yourself in danger."

Before Hunk, choked by emotion, could respond, she swept out of the room. But she left the door open behind her.

***

It didn't take long for Pidge to come through the open doorway, her laptop under her arm. She set it down carefully on Hunk's box-table, then spun around to glare at him. "Hunk, you idiot," she snapped, jabbing a finger at him. "What did you think you were doing? You didn't have to stay in the control booth. We would have gotten out of there."

"Not with the Portal of Origins," Hunk said, thrown immediately onto the defensive. "If it had gotten damaged, or if the Green Lion couldn't break through the hull-"

"We tear Galra hulls open all the time from the outside, so it wouldn't have been that hard. And I don't care about the Portal of Origins," Pidge said, crossing her arms and tilting her head so that the glint of light on her glasses hid her eyes. Her mouth was still tight, her jaw set, but her shoulders were hunched, and her voice cracked just a little. "You forced us to leave you behind! We saw you get captured! Do you have any idea how that felt?"

"Hey, whoa, whoa, Shiro said no yelling," Lance said, sauntering through the door. "I thought you said you were going to show him your metanumerical analysis... thing."

Hunk waved gratefully at Lance, but he kept looking at Pidge's hunched shoulders and half-turned head, her pursed mouth sliding towards a pout and her jaw working with frustration. "It probably felt pretty scary," he said. "I know I was really scared."

Pidge's hands fisted at her sides, and she looked down at the floor, her shoulders shaking. "I didn't know if I was ever going to see you again," she muttered. "The Galra took you, and I didn't know if I'd ever get you back. Like Dad, and Matt. You- you guys- you're my friends. I don't want to lose you too."

"It's okay,' Hunk said, and opened his mouth to say more, but before he could Pidge had flung herself at him. Her chin dug into his chest, and she jabbed her bony shoulders up into his armpits as soon as he opened his own arms and wrapped them around her, but Hunk held on tight.

He could tell by the way she was shaking in his arms that she was crying, but he didn't realize that he was too until Lance squeezed in next to them and joined the hug, burying his face in Pidge's hair. Then Hunk felt hot tears trickling down his own cheeks, and he bowed his head over them and held them both as close as he could.

"I love you guys," Lance said in a muffled voice, after a long while. "How about none of us is allowed to get captured without the rest of us, ever again."

"Deal," Pidge answered. So none of us should get captured at all, if we actually work together."

"I'm okay with that," Hunk agreed. "I really don't want to repeat that whole thing."

That seemed to be the cue for everyone to wiggle apart, the worst of the crying over. Hunk squirmed up to nestle at the head of his bed, pushing one of his pillows down towards them in invitation, and Pidge promptly grabbed it and shoved it behind her back with one hand while she grabbed her laptop with the other. Lance sprawled out on top of them both, butt in Pidge's lap and feet in Hunk's, and propped his head on his arm at the foot of his bed.

"Show Hunk the thing, Pidge," he said, poking her in the leg. "The really boring meta-alphabetical thing that you keep making me look at. I don't think I can take hearing about it any longer."

"Then why are you still here?" Pidge asked him, but she flipped up the lid of her laptop and turned it to let Hunk see the screen. "I've been working on that alphanumberical meta-analysis program I told you about a while back that should help us scan through Galra data for important information. I started running it on what we've already got, and it's getting decent results, but it could be a lot faster and it's pulling up a lot of false positives."

"Are you using the format translator we put together for the Galactic Hub?" Hunk asked. "I could tell it wasn't doing a perfect conversion back then, but we didn't really have the time to look at it then, with all the running and shooting and stuff."

"I am, and we can take another look at that now," Pidge said. "But it's not the only problem clogging up the program. I need a lot more keywords, and it keeps pulling up these chunks of corrupted data that I thought you might be able to figure out."

Leaning in to take a closer look, Hunk felt the weight in his sinuses shift, and reached for a handkerchief before he could begin to drip on the keyboard. At the foot of the bed, Lance nearly drowned out Hunk's follow-up question with a noisy fake snore, and Pidge jerked her knee up to jab him with it. Hunk grinned at Lance's grumbling and tilted the laptop screen, already absorbed in the problem.

If Shiro hadn't come back by tomorrow, maybe Hunk would feel well enough to get out of bed and hunt him down. There were a few more things he was starting to feel ready to say, and Shiro had offered to listen. He had to thank Keith and Coran, too, and maybe he would ask Allura what she and Shiro had figured out about the Komad. But for now he had his two best friends within arm's reach, ready and willing to offer whatever support he needed, and that was enough.


End file.
